 Prak, thank you for being with us today. My pleasure. Now you talk a lot about cities and you do that through visualisation much more than you do looking at stats and data. Why do you look at visualisation? Why is that important? Data visualisation is critical because we are a visual species, right? We actually understand pictures, images, video, even sounds better than just reading words. And this is particularly the case when we're trying to emphasise some of these big megatrends like urbanisation. It's one thing to simply say most of the world population lives in cities. But then in your mind you're still thinking, well the world is still defined by these national boundaries between 200 sovereign states. But if you look at a visualisation that shows you where every human being in the world is and you see this bright coloured belt of people concentrating around coastal Asia basically and other key urban corridors like Northwestern Europe, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, you start to imagine the organisation of the human species being literally very, very different from what our mental and political maps tell us. I think only data visualisation and mapping can really drive that point home. We are actually not a human civilisation that is neatly organised into 200 countries. We are actually a coastal urban civilisation. That is a more true statement about mankind than that sovereign states are the immutable mode of human organisation. That's not true. The urban coastal reality is much more true. It's been becoming more and more true for 60,000 years. It has history on its side. And if you don't map that, it's much more difficult to persuade people. And as soon as people see the map, they're like, oh yes, it has to be true because I'm looking at it, right? So that's why it's so important. So what does it take to be a global city? So it actually has a very strict definition or formal definition, a global city ranks in the top tier for being the conduit of flows for goods, for people, for capital, for services, for data and so forth. So you have to be one of the places that amasses, that concentrates or that filters these flows around the world. And they are actually for the thousands of cities that there are in the world and for the dozens of mega cities that there are in the world, there's only about six or seven actual true top tier global cities. New York and London, Hong Kong and Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai, Los Angeles. Those are the top tier global cities. In other words, if they go offline, so to speak, a lot of flows of goods, services, data, people, it's on go with them, so to speak. And so they really are not just financial or demographic or even political centers for their own country. They are far more the capitals functionally for entire regions and regions that span boundaries. So Singapore is not at all a mega city. It is only five million people. But three quarters of all of the foreign investment, the hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investment from all over the planet earth that flow into the ASEAN region of 700 million people, three quarters of it flows through little, little Singapore, right? So that's one little anecdote that demonstrates how a place can be a global city, even though it will always be a very small island with less than 10 million people. So you talked today about the different levels of development, I guess, within cities going from survival to quality of life. Can you describe what constitutes each of those four levels? Sure. So most people in the world who, first of all, only about 60% of the world's population is urbanized. So by definition, really, the majority of the world's population, those who live in mega cities of the developing world or in rural areas, live at this very basic level of infrastructure where you just have basic marketization, you have very simple housing, you have inadequate sanitation, if any sanitation and so forth. Literally much of the world's population is still there. Then you start to have more basic infrastructure around housing. You may have hospitals or be more like medical clinics. You may have some sewage collection and so forth. And then you start to get up to, today what we think of is modern cities that are, but still very inadequate. So even in places like Mumbai, New Delhi, Jakarta, Manila, these are really big, huge cities, but they're very, very stratified. Small quadrants of people live in places with very high-quality services where you would think that they were in Sydney, but there's very few people. You have tens of millions who live in slums or just tenements. You've got maybe just housing blocks stretching for miles and miles. At least they have housing, but it's now the services are insufficient in supply, whether it's transportation, education and so forth. So only at the top end, at the far right end of the spectrum, the highest quality of life cities, a very small percentage of the world population actually lives, not just in the cities, but in the districts of cities, because here I'm not talking about the Bronx. If we're talking about New York, I'm talking about Central Park South in Manhattan. So in the same city or worldwide, the number of people who have access to that highest quality of life, the sustainable buildings, clean energy, the top sort of educational and healthcare facilities and so forth, that is not available to the masses. So we're talking about maybe a couple of hundred million people out of a population of eight billion people in the world who enjoy that quality of life. And the task that we have is not to move every human being into downtown Sydney. That's not what the future is going to look like or should look like, but it's certainly to improve the infrastructural quality and access for the majority of the world's population because without those basics, you don't become consumers. You don't become educated. You don't live a healthy life. You are not going to become a driver of economic growth. We are going to live in highly unequal and stratified economic systems where the top five or 10% are driving everything for a long time to come until everyone has the basics. And so it's important for everyone to have those basics and we're going to live in a low growth world, except for in those places where you start to increase access for people and access begins with infrastructure. So you've talked a lot about boundaries and the old fashioned nature of some boundaries compared to what's really going on with the development of cities. Can we just talk about the United States as an example now with the 50 states on mainland United States? How would you reorganize those? So as with most countries, you have multiple layers of authority vertically, federal, state, local, municipal. So at the federal level, there's only one national government that is in Washington. But you have these 50 states. Now the 50 states is obviously a legacy of devising political administrative boundaries, mostly vertical lines, very large Western states. This owes really itself to 18th century logic of America's expansion and demarcating these administrative rectangles, basically. It's not exactly a good way to explain or even understand how the 300 million citizens of the United States operate on a day-to-day level. If you actually use data analysis to look at people's commuting patterns, where do they live versus where do they work? Where do they travel for business? If you look at their telephone calls, who do they call? What zip code? What area code? What area code? If you look at how they spend money, you will find that America has actually functionally organized, not according to these 50 administrative political states, but according to 40 high-density clusters around the country, mostly from the Northeast and the Ark that goes through the South all the way westward up through California, whereas the Midwest and Great Plains is largely depopulated. So there are 40 cities that actually administratively organize America. And that's a different map from those 50 rigidly divided states. But those 50 states are the ones represented in Congress, so you have an enormous amount of distortion in how fiscal allocation is done. It's not that the rural areas that control a lot of the political voice should be neglected, but there needs to be more balance and harmony. So I would, in fact, not necessarily do away with the 50 states as they are, but I would give a lot more power, a lot more fiscal voice to these urban conurbations, but with the emphasis that they actually have to connect to each other so that you enhance mobility of people around the country. That's absolutely fundamental. Mobility is not just something that we increasingly think of as a human right globally. Mobility is something that's really foundational for people to resort themselves as economies evolve. And we're seeing that that's a very critical priority for America today. So there are a lot of reforms that I would propose to the United States at all levels, federal, state, and local. But one of the key things is that the most densely populated areas need to have a sufficient political voice so that they can have the capital allocation that's necessary to provide for their people. I don't think that that is sort of an irrational claim. Just finally, I know that you talked a lot about the smart cities today within the forum, and the number of smart cities there are that claim smart city status. If you could narrow it down from that 2,500 cities and pick your top five, who are the top five that Australia should be looking to to learn more about smart city status? That's a great question, a difficult question. Of course, smart cities has become something of an industry, and I visited many so-called smart city projects around the world, and they're not particularly impressive. And a lot of people think that greenfield cities are the way to go. Where are the places in the world where you've built a high-tech city from scratch, and it really represents a role model and archetype of the high quality of life and sustainability that Australian cities want to emulate? And the answer is exactly zero. Australian cities already rank, whether it's Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, already ranked very, very high in terms of bringing together all of these attributes of good public services, affordable lifestyle, good harmony with nature, strong services, community, walkability, mixed use, real estate developments. India already features a lot of that. But if you want to evolve in the technological domain and think about how can you do this better? There are certainly places like Barcelona, like Berlin, where you're starting to see the latest technologies come together with public priorities, with upgrading infrastructure, with encouraging entrepreneurship through digital connectivity at the individual level. All of those factors in America, Seattle is doing really interesting things because they are a very powerful city that's saying we are going to raise local taxes to ensure a lot more investment in affordable housing and the technology upgrades in education and facilitation of e-commerce. It's the home of Amazon, of course, for all the people here. And people are flocking there because it's affordable. It's high-tech. It's sustainable. It's progressive. So Australia really does have those elements. So it depends on what you want to do. What any particular Australia city wants to do better than it's already doing, you may want to look at places like the Seattle's and the Barcelona's and the Berlin's. But I assure you, Australians, listening here, there are very few places in the world doing anything better than you are. So I hope that's an optimistic message. Thank you very much for your time, Farag. We really appreciate it.